4/6 Reflector PLL-DLR

Heyoka

Path of the Sacred Clown

by Peggy Andreas / Written 1995

In my last article, I wrote of the Native American spiritual path of the Sacred Warrior. To Native Americans, the path of the Sacred Clown is ALSO considered a spiritual calling, essential to the smooth functioning of the tribe:

In the days before the invaders came. . .we had clowns. Not clowns like you see now, with round red noses and baggy costumes. Our clowns wore all kinds of stuff. Anythin’ they felt like, they wore. And they didn’t just come out once in a while to act silly and make people laugh, our clowns were with us all the time, as important to the village as the chief, or the shaman, or the dancers, or the poets.1

Most every tribe had their Clowns. The Oglala and Lakota called them Heyoka (“crazy”), the Arapaho called them Ha Hawkan (“holy idiot”), and both peoples considered them religious specialists. The Salish people honor the memory of a Clown who (not so long ago) challenged a missionary. The missionary was enticing people to come to his church by handing out little mirrors to them while urging them to cover their bodies with white folks’ clothes. It is told with a smile that the Clown (a woman!) walked into the church one Sunday wearing nothing but a hat and old shoes! Read the book to find out what happened!2

The Hopis protected their Sacred Clowns by incorporating them into their Katchina (“Cloud spirit”) ceremonies where the Clowns make a hilarious entrance from a roof, descending a rope ladder into the plaza where the Katchinas are dancing. “Look down there!” they exclaim, “Everything is bountiful and beautiful!” Their descent is very precarious, usually head-first, and causes much laughter as they tumble over each other and fall the last few feet. They do not see the Katchinas until they bump into them, and then they say “This is MINE!” or “This many are MINE!” They act silly, childish, greedy, selfish, and lewd. As they pretend to become aware of their surroundings, they mock tourists, anthropologists, neighboring Indians, even themselves! They beg for food. Their guessing games and balancing acts please the crowds. The dancing Clowns sometimes pretend they are invisible, heightening the joke.3

The survival of these ritual clowns gives us a clue as to how important a Clown was to the community-spirit of each Native American tribe. Nothing was sacred to a Sacred Clown. She was a social critic of the highest order. Her funny mimicry and joking exposed hypocrisy and arrogance. Her portrayals of ridiculous behavior showed the people (in a very humorous way) their own foolishness and blind-spots. “A clown was like a newspaper, or a magazine, or one of those people who write an article to tell you if a book or a movie is worth botherin’ with. They made comment on everythin’, every day, all the time. If a clown thought that what the tribal council was gettin’ ready to do was foolish, why the clown would just show up at the council and imitate every move every one of the leaders made. Only the clown would imitate it in such a way every little wart on that person would show, every hole in their idea would suddenly look real big.”
Read more

The Upside-Down, Forward-Backward, Icy-Hot Contrary

“I am going to tell you a story about clowns, but it won’t be a funny story. For us Indians everything has a deeper meaning; whatever we do is somehow connected with our religion. I’m working up to this part. To us a clown is somebody sacred, funny, powerful, ridiculous, holy, shameful, visionary. He is all this and then some more. Fooling around, a clown is really performing a spiritual ceremony. He has a power. It comes from the thunder-beings, not the animals or the earth. In our Indian belief a clown has more power than the atom bomb. This power could blow off the dome of the Capitol.

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I have told you that I once worked as a rodeo clown. This was almost like doing spiritual work. Being a clown, for me, came close to being a medicine man. It was in the same nature. A clown in our language is called heyoka. He is an upside-down, backward-forward, yes-and-no man, a contrary-wise. Everybody can be made into a clown, from one day to another, whether he likes it or not. It is very simple to become a heyoka. All you have to do is dream about the lightning, the thunderbirds. You do this, and when you wake up in the morning you are a heyoka. There is nothing you can do about it.

Being a clown brings you honor, but also shame. It gives you a power, but you have to pay for it. A heyoka does strange things. He says “yes” when he means “no:’ He rides his horse backward. He wears his moccasins or boots the wrong way. When he’s coming, he’s really going. When it’s real hot, during a heat wave, a heyoka will shiver with cold, put his mittens on and cover himself with blankets. He’ll build a big fire and complain that he is freezing to death. In the wintertime, during a blizzard, when the temperature drops down to 40 degrees below, the heyoka will be in a sticky sweat. It’s too hot for him. He’s putting on a bathing suit and says he’s going for a swim to cool off.

My grandma told me about one clown who used to wander around naked for hours in subzero weather, wearing only his breechcloth, complaining all the time about the heat. They called him Heyoka Osni-the cold fool. Another clown was called the straighten-outener. He was always running around with a hammer trying to flatten round and curvy things, makin~ them straight, things like soup dishes, eggs, balls, rrogs or cartwheels. My grandma had one of those round glass chimneys which fits over a kerosense lamp. Well, he straightened it out for her. It’s not easy to be a heyoka. It is even harder to have one in the family.”- John (Fire) Lame Deer – Seeker of Visions